Clearer

THE MAIN AREA OF MY HOUSE is beginning to approach normality. A cluttered normality with an Everest Heap of clothes in the middle, books to one side all higgledypiggledy because there's too many to stack up... there's still a week's worth of cleaning and clearing to go.

It doesn't quite look like the photo, but it will do. When I win the lottery and move.

Too much to drink at 3am

AKH! ALCOHOL. Alcohol alcohol. I've drunk past a week's worth of alcoholic units in the past 24 hours. Her Majesty's Chief Medical Officer suggests I may safely drink 28 units, that's 280mls neat alcohol, in the course of a week. (Never a day.) Today I've had past 30, that's 300mls neat alcohol. 4 litres of white cyder. Akh. I am not proud.

In my youth drink was the most boring drug known to man. (That is: known to me.) Never in a million years was I tempted to knock back spirits (or even beer) in the day. Even down the bar I was as happy with lemonade as beer. Alcohol-free beer was good for me. Strangely, the student bar didn't stock that one...

My point being: I was never much of a drinker. Yeah: I got drunk a couple of times. Cross-eyed and unable to walk drunk. Stomach scrubbed out with a Brillo pad because you haven't eaten all day and don't know how to take care of yourself drunk.

The worst hangover I ever had didn't correct itself for three days. I drank a lot of cyder that night.

(Cyder becomes a recurring theme.)

I only got into drink because I thought I needed Dutch courage to beg passers-by for money. My sign said "HUNGRY PLEASE HELP." I made sure I never ate before I went begging, so my sign was in every way true. I never ate in those days until last thing at night. One meal a day. I thought skeletal looked good. Looking back at nasty snapshots I looked like crap.

Of course I was begging because I was broke. I was broke because I was on heroin. Drink and heroin made ready partners. Right from the beginning my Big Complaint about gear was that it was no longer doing it for me.

That was a big reason I put myself into rehab. I didn't appreciate just how much gear actually did until I took it away. Then I started to fall apart in an ugly way. Then I ran screaming back to the gear and all its fluffy cosiness.

And that was why I could never tolerate methadone. A friend once told me 60mg was equivalent to a £10 bag IV. At the time I thought: Nah, 60mg's worth way more than that. The druggieclinic give out 10mg to equate £10 gear (0.2g) as standard. But that's ridiculous. All these years later I can accept: my friend was right. When the gear was good, I could barely hold myself on 100mg. That was without a script ie I had no double habit. I would sweat heavily, even go into cramps on methadone at "high doses".

The methadone I bought came in the form of Physeptone pills. There was no question of anybody interfering with it. (Street-bought "juice" is very often watered, if only slightly.)

It wasn't until this Great Heroin Drought that methadone ever held me properly. Certainly better than the crap-arse gear going around a few weeks ago. Way better.

So as heroin's hold has faded, alcohol's has tightened. And I want out. I need out. I've had enough of intoxicating substances. It's time to go it alone.

I don't know how I'll do it, but it's time.

If you go away

I'M STILL clearing up. I'm hoping to get the worst of it done by tonight, then I have one clear room. Not completely perfect, but within the bounds of "normality"... At last!

I've thrown away one black bag full of empty sin bins, and I'll have another black sack full of full ones for the exchange! I'm so looking forward to turning up as Junkie of the Year. Not.

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD: IF YOU GO AWAY
This tune just came on tv. I like:~

Toothpaste stains

I GOT UP AT 4:30 this morning. I feel like I could do with a year's more sleep but there you go. After smoking lots of cigarettes, trotting down the shop for smoked mackerel, Hovis bread and 2 litres of cyder (I'm cutting down) plus my tropical fruit juice (supposedly it's as good for you as eating veg, but I find that hard to believe)... after all this I scurried back home and wasted an hour watching BBC's early morning news and rubbish. The guy presenting used to be ITN's royal correspondent but I can't remember his name. Nick something. Being royal correspondent meant tilting your head slightly and inflecting the voice all sentimental-like whenever mentioning the Queen Mother. I was never convinced the Queen Mum was quite as kindly as portrayed. For one thing HM the Queen appeared, from the vast distance I view her, to be completely under her thumb. Since her Mum's death she seems to have become much more of her own woman. Her fashion sense appears to have improved immensely. The Queen is the funkiest-dressing old woman alive. With the exception of Rosie, the Trance granny who made luminous laurel crowns. I met her at the Warp club (Rosie, not the Queen) under an enormous railway arch round the corner from the London Dungeon, but I had seen her picture in the music press. She was famous for her octogenarian psychedelic ways.

There is a bevy of sparrows down my road. They live in a hedge and chirp their tuneless little heads off every morning. Cheep! Chirp! Twit! Twat! Twitter!! They say. My nightingale, who used to live in the nearest tree to our house is still on migration in West Africa. He or she won't be back until the spring. I know it was a nightingale because I matched the bird by appearance and song. The song was amazing, it tweetled and twittered all night like an LSD canary. I kept my window open especially. O man those sparrows are chirruping LOUD this morning. Sparrows all but disappeared from London about 15 years ago. They used to hang out in flocks along with the pigeons in parks. Even today, though you see them more, they're rare.

HEROIN! I haven't used any since I non-used the other day.. how many days clear am I now..? Seven days. I scored on December 23rd. Just checked me blog. That's the convenience of being a blogger. I know the day and date I did everything. Now I'm off to get my methadone. They're usually open by 8:30. I took half as much methadone as usual yesterday and today and am not feeling it so far... does this make me Addict-Invincible or will a horrible rebound come and slam me with creepytime withdrawal..? I bet it will. But there ya go. I want OFF that crap. The sooner the better. Chemical slavery. Heroin without any fun at all. I hate it.

I've got to go. Those sparrows are distracting me bigtime.

This is the twit-twit jug-jug chirrupydirrupydoodles song of the nightingale:



WOW I can't believe this, this is ROSIE from the Warp on film!!!



Warp Club London 1999: on lots of lovely MDMA hippieflipping I accidentally took 2 Mitsubishis at once in here, fell asleep and woke up flying through the roof. That was a good night (well morning: the club finished at 9pm so I never usually turned up till 6 or 7 in the morning)...
The place looks sparse because it was probably 11am by the time this was shot, and there were at least 5 more rooms of equal or bigger size, it was a HUGE club...
... ukh was the dancing really that terrible? I must have been on drugs!!



Illustrated: wow! a sink dirtier than mine! BBC Breakfast with Dermott Murnughan and Sian somethingorother; HM the Queen, looks good in a hat; a nightingale

Meet Nubia

NUBIA was one of the best pet fishes I ever had. She was a Borneo Sucker or hillstream loach. These stealth-bomber-style fishies live in shallow pebbly streams where they zip along the shallow aerated water, sticking to rocks as the tumult swirls about them.

Relative to her size, Nubia must have been the fastest-moving most agile swimmer I ever had. The lady at the fish shop was totally exasperated trying to catch her between two nets in an empty tank as she pinged back and forth in great commotion. She looked like a flying ribbon.

Nubia lived in a special cave that I built her by hollowing out the gravel at the front and placing a flat piece of slate over the dip. Here she spent her hours of repose, happily suckered upside down ignoring the world (it takes all sorts). She didn't seem too offended when I picked up the rock to have a good look. She just stayed anchored down. And then whooshed away in a flurry of bubbles.

We had an air filter streaming against the glass at the side, and this was her second favourite place. She was a strong enough swimmer to actually move vertically downwards against the air-and-waterflow.

Loaches are my favourite sort of fish. They skulk about in the shadowiest, most secluded zones of the so-called community tank, eschewing the company of other fish, preferring to dart about very quickly at selected opportunities. They don't eat fishfood, but feed instead on algae on the glass, which means you should never place one in a brand-new tank or it'll starve.

It took me a while to realize that Nubia's most striking characteristic was one I'd previously attributed to a trick of the light. Sometimes she seemed to go light and then dark as if a shadow were passing overhead. Then I realized she was actually changing colour, more according to mood (so I assumed) than anything else.

How amazing is that.

So there we have it. The Borneo Sucker: the most amazing fish known to aquarium-kind!

Male Sewellia lineolata and Gastromyzon ctenocephalus having a scuffle on a cobble (as you do). Well as gripping viewing goes it beats Larkrise to Candleford hands down:~

This is what I look like Anna

THIS is why I say I'm in a mess, Anna.

When I look in the mirror I see Worzel Gummidge.

I am in a terrible mess.

Worzel Gummidge looks better than me.

At least Worzel Gummidge got paid for being on TV.



PS this is what I look like in drag:


I wouldn't want to meet me down a dark alley!!

Clearer

CLEARNESS IS SLOWLY STARTING TO APPEAR! My cluttered home is steadily decluttering. It's taking a LOT longer than I would like. I think it will take another 10 days to get things totally clear but the rate I'm going it's going very well.

I can't sleep and I'm exhausted. As I said I'm not doing anywhere like as much clearing as I'd like... but it IS being done. I'm so glad.

Everyone have a look at my cat video below; it's fantastic. I like the way he keeps patting the cat and that seems to palcate the poor purrer as it's wrapped in paper with a bow put on its head ...

Illustration: a 1940s housewife would go nuts in my house

2:48am Cleanup

UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS has just just finished on reapeat. The original was only on a few hours ago. This was a classic TV serial about servants and posh people in a London townhouse from my childhood. Now the BBC have brought it back with the same actress playing Rose. If you're across the Pond and get BBC America, watch this, it's A1 costume drama. I like a good costume drama but it does have to be good. Upstairs Downstairs is even better than Downton Abbey. Next week that dreadful Larkrise to Nowhere is back on I cannot stand that.

I've been watching night time television. Prince Charles showed us his bird-chirping garden. The feathery little entertainers were singing their tiny hearts out for the heir to the throne. I'd like a garden like that, but I'd go for 10,000 acres, not just 15.

Now enough about television I have just had pasta in Lloyd Grossman tomato sauce. My Mum bought me the pasta sauce. Normally I'd buy Ragu. A Ragu means you can have five times as many tomatoes as weight as they're evaporated down in an oven dish. Welshcakes Limoncello probably knows how to do this. Her Xmas dinner pictures at her friend's house are amazing.

Now I'm in a buzzy mood. Having woken up feeling vile and dire. Like death warmed up. I said I was cleaning and I did have a stab at it but I basically felt ill so I went back to bed in the afternoon and slept till 9pm. Now I'm up and racing nicely. No I have NOT been taking amphetamines or any other drugs. It's just a natural mood swing. I'm only drinking for medicinal reasons. Keeps the jangly edge off. Now I must go I have to scrub this ******* floor. ******* houses. ******* landlord. ******* life. **** **** **** ****! See I'm being awfully prim by depriving you of my obscenity tirade.

I have to go. Keeping moving keeps me UP. And UP gets the cleaning done. I am crystal clear and shining. Gotta move gotta move gotta MOVE MOVE MOVE MOVE MOVE!!

Do you like my blue smiling face? Isn't it amazing. Blue is the best colour. There's nothing unhappy about blue. Blue is a high by itself. Cool blue ....

4:14am: a catalogue of freak accidents in the US. 8 homeless people burned to death in New Orleans, 5 teenagers asphyxiated in Florida motel, 8 injured in ski lift disaster in Maine ...

Oh yeah and a riot at a Moscow airport due to no de-icing spray (no: staff probably drank it!)

HOW TO WRAP A CAT FOR XMAS
This film, with 4,000,000 views so far, provoked "outrage" among humourless animal charities who seem to spend most of their existence flailing about for something to be upset and offended about. I hope they really got their money's worth from this because it's hilarious:

Still here

I WENT TO BED AROUND 3AM, GOT UP AT 7:30AM. I felt dire. I spent an hour in a chair, knocking back methadone and three huge wine glasses of tapwater. I drank so much last night I was actually (slightly) hung over. Buying white cyder in 3-litre bottles was not the good idea I thought it was.

I barely get hangovers now. Somebody told me this has to do with opiate-dependence and I think they were right.

Actually I spent more than an hour in that chair. More like three. Finally at approaching quarter past eleven after two more enormous wineglasses of Hair of the Dog white cyder I'm starting to feel OK.

Everything I said in that earlier post "Gun to my head" was (unfortunately) true.

I got a comment from Gattina just now. Gattina is now a grandmother. She lives in Belgium with her Italian husband. Is German born, but speaks French (and English). In fact she speaks four languages fluently plus Dutch*, which she always says she doesn't speak, but if I can follow it just from knowing German and having studied a tiny bit of Dutch, I know she can. Notice I say "follow" not "speak".

She says I have to do what I have to do and in my mother's words Take Responsibility.

This is the crux of the problem: that's exactly what I tell myself! So why won't I listen?

Anyway who cares about listening; it's doing that counts. So I'm doing what I have to, albeit far FAR more slowly than I'd like. Chucking everything I don't need out out OUT.

*Gattina's grandson lives in Amsterdam and the northern part of Belgium speaks Flemish or Vlaams, as they call it, a dialect of Dutch.

A Gun to my Head

I'M IN TROUBLE WITH MY LANDLORD for being too scruffy. At least I think I am. Downstairs told me this. Downstairs and I do not get on. This is the trouble I have and I can tell you but it doesn't make anything any clearer or less How It Is.

Last time I was in trouble with my landlord (my old landlord) basically for living in a mess, for not coping. A way worse mess than this one, the day I had to go down the council to sort out my housing I had this weird feeling, as if someone had put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. Instead of feeling pain or stress I just felt unreal. I could not engage with anything. I knew what was happening, but it was not real to me.

That is how I feel now. I should be in a frantic scrabble to clear up, but I'm not. In a way I don't care about anything at all. If I get chucked out I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go on holiday. Or vacation, to you Americans. I will take as much methadone as I can carry. I know where to buy it so I can get a week's supply up front at high doses. This I will cut down drastically on the road. Detoxing makes me hyper. Hyper makes me pace. Pacing is walking. I can get a lot of travelling done by detoxing. If I feel suicidal I'm lucky because there's snow. I need only go to sleep outside and I might be lucky enough to die. But I'm not into dying, as I said I'm going on holiday. I won't say where because people will try and follow me or spy on me. But I'm going.

If I stay here I will turn my home into an operating theatre. But I'm almost hoping to get chucked out. Because I'm fed up of my old life. The problems and non-problems I thought were caused by heroin seemingly aren't. I always knew this was the case. Heroin was only a mask, masking the reality of a person not coping. I don't need heroin to dissociate myself. I don't need heroin as an anaesthetic. I only feel real pain in withdrawal or extreme mood states. My ordinary depression is usually mild enough just to blank me. Most of the time. But I have a nasty tendency to cycle through various mental states and into one when I realize with full weight and intensity What I Have Done. And then I feel very deeply negligent and sorry. Sorry for the hurt I have caused others. And sorry for myself. Usually I don't feel for myself, but sometimes I do, and I hate feeling anything.

So I can live without heroin. Heroin was just a waste of time. I want off these opiates, they're only disabling an already disabled person. The sooner I'm off them the better. If I get made homeless I will have an A1 chance to come off because I will be nowhere near my methadone pharmacy, nowhere near the drug clinic or my "loving mother" who only wants to salve her conscience ~ or the rest of my family who do love me but I pity them for it. I wish I could kill their pain without killing them. (Maybe they would be better off on heroin!)

See I feel sad now because I have written the words of a badly messed up, lost person and I feel that. I can't accept that I am that person. Because if I could I would already be working not to be like that and I cannot do it. I try. I do try, but something invisible and very powerful, like bulletproof glass... something stops me. I wish I had never been born. I hate knowing the World. I don't care what the world knows about me, but I don't want to know the world any more. I never asked to live like this. I never asked to know what I know. I am the sort of idiot who would have bitten that forbidden fruit in Eden. I know. Drugs like Ecstasy, acid, ketamine, mushrooms opened up an understanding of something that is inexplicable to someone who hasn't been there. A kind of knowledge of good. A vision of paradise (on Ecstasy especially). So did heroin: an understanding of Evil. And a desperation you never knew was possible. And feeling it every single day for years on end.

I don't want to know. I don't want to know anything any more. I wish the anaesthesia would come back.

Ridding

I GOT RID OF ALL MY NEEDLES. I cleared two drawers full of drug-rubble. The towerblock-shaped yellow sharps bin is full. I filled three smaller bins with more needles. I'm determined to clear as much as I can today, but I feel tired and basically ill. I need more energy.

I have one drawer to go but it has more "normal" stuff in it. I hate dealing with drug paraphernalia, as it makes me think of drugs.

Literally everything I have that I don't need is going. Like I say I do need more energy because I'm exhausted already. But I'm not giving up. I'm fed up of living in a dump.

Riddance

I WAS IN A SERIOUSLY ANTIMETHADONE MOOD yesterday wasn't I? I was despairing that I'd ever have a life on methadone. I'm not sure I ever will but I
can try. And if I can't do that, I can get rid of the methadone. Not sure how I'll survive, but I'm determined to try that too.

My current priority is to clear my house, which is in a terrible mess. I have rubbish rubbish rubbish. Stuff I've picked up on the street ~ furniture. A television set also retrieved from the street I haven't even plugged in to see if it works. Clothes, sheets, crap all tangled and strewn. I have about 30 black sacks in readiness for the Great Chucking Out. I threw out quite a lot last week. This week the rest Has To Go. I'm setting a time limit of New Year's Eve, by which time my home shall be gleaming like an operating theatre.

Does anybody know a magic cure for unhappiness? I google stuff on depression and get the same useless DSM Diagnostic Criteria. I don't care about that rubbish or whether it's genetic, environmental, drug-induced or all three (probably all three). I want to know how to get Rid. Along with all that Rubbish. Rid Rid Rid.

Good Riddance, Bad Rubbish!

Dreaming of a China White Christmas

***THIS is a bit of a mixed-bag.***
It starts with facts regarding World Heroin Production and how Britain relies on Afghanistan to provide our 30 tonnes+ annual heroin consumption and how arranging alternative supply-lines is easier said than done.

I then launch into a pro-Heroin-Assisted-Treatment, antimethadone critique of British prescribing practice to addicts one of (my favourite subjects to rant on).
I then apply the barely-existent treatment options mentioned to my own life and ask what else could I do, apart from what I'm already doing now...

IF ANYBODY HAS BETTER FACTS, NEWER IDEAS, FINE LINKS OR ANYTHING HELPFUL OR CRITICAL, DON'T HOLD BACK. PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT. BE AS DETAILED AS YOU LIKE. ALL OPINIONS ARE WELCOME.

MANY THANKS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO YOU ALL XXX

IN ANSWER to some of the drought comments I got, I've dug out some facts regarding world heroin and opium cultivation and consumption. You'll notice from the information up top that Europe consumes more than four times as much heroin as North America.

Several commenters have wondered why Colombia, upon which the Eastern United States rely almost exclusively for their supply, doesn't ship their lovely #4 white heroin to the drought-ridden UK I can give you an answer.

Of course it is quite possible that Colombian heroin might find its way here in small amounts. But Colombia produces only 5-10 tonnes of heroin per year, enough to suffice for America's Eastern seaboard, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the UK's pre-drought consumption of 30-35 tonnes of heroin per year. 35 tonnes would be the entire annual production of Burma. (Burma produced 345 tonnes opium in 2009, equivalent to just under 35 tonnes of China White heroin.)

Alternative sources of supply to the UK could easily take two years or more to arrange. Last week I was talking to a retired dealer to used to serve my local area when it was the norm for addicts to score from other addicts. This person knows a lot about how the heroin trade actually works. I was told categorically that the time lapse between harvest in Afghanistan and heroin bags on Britain's streets is at least a year to eighteen months.

The government know they could smash the heroin trade by prescribing pharmaceutical heroin to addicts. Switzerland is the only country to have implemented diamorphine therapy as a first-line treatment. Now Switzerland, once notorious for its "needle parks" and a centrepoint for drug tourism, has some of the lowest rates of heroin use in Europe.

Pharmaceutical heroin is widely used in the UK as pain relief. Many family doctors carry diamorphine amps in their medical bags. But contrary to certain reports, diamorphine is prescribed only rarely to addicts in the UK. Estimates state that only 400-800 addicts receive diamorphine therapy in this country. The latest experimental scheme, RIOTT, trialled injectable diamorphine against injectable methadone and oral methadone. Not surprisingly the success rate of oral methadone was dire. Injectable methadone did better. Injectable diamorphine did best of all, with an 80% reduction in illicit drug use among those prescribed this treatment.

It is easy to test for illicit opiates against pharmaceutical grade heroin, so cheating is not possible. Any use of street heroin on top of a diamorphine prescription is easily flagged up by a simple urine test.

Different countries have implemented diamorphine prescription in different ways. In Switzerland, the Diaphin diamorphine is premixed to a strength of 100mg/1ml, handed to the patient in a syringe and injected in the presence of a trained nurse. A similar system was trialled in Holland. In the UK, patients are eventually allowed to take home their diamorphine prescription (usually in 100mg and 30mg dry amps). They can then fit the prescribed drug into their lives as most convenient (e.g. directly before or after food, at bedtime, immediately on waking and so on: the times addicts most like to use). They can also mix the hit to the strength and dilution that suits them best.

Presciption-wise, the Netherlands have been the most forward-thinking, issuing not only injectable heroin hydrochloride to needle-wielding addicts, but pharmaceutical-grade smokeable heroin base to addicts who chased their dose from tinfoil. Caffeine was added to the white heroin base to make it run more easily over the foil.

Another treatment used in the Netherlands yet barely heard of elsewhere is an oral therapy that has been shown to help addicts with a needle-fixation (like I had/have). Detxtromoramide (better known as Palfium) was issued to addicts in Holland who were receiving oral methadone doses, but proved unable to give up injecting street heroin on top. Palfium syrup (or noninjectable pills) work quickly and effectively by mouth. Knocking back a dose has a similar effect to slamming back alcohol. Within minutes a "hit" is felt. A degree of willingness plus a prescription for Palfium could help thousands of addicts in Britain and elsewhere to make that final step of stopping using on top of methadone. If only our governments were a little more open-minded years and years of suffering could be brought to an end within months.

Of course the Government will not listen. The "experts" who have trawled medical papers, compared clinical trials and yet may never have popped an opiate in their lives, much less lived through years of addiction... these get a full hearing. While the true experts, the addicts on the street, who can vouch first hand how ineffectual at quashing drug-cravings oral methadone actually is ~ are dismissed as whingeing, deceptive junkies who'd say anything to get a free high.

Well drug addiction IS (among many other things) about getting high. Take an addict's high from them, and they'll use something else that WILL give that missing high. This "high" gets addicts out of the door and to appointments. It gets them to eat, to sleep. The high helps them engage with their children, spend quality time and play games they might not ordinarily want to play. So get out of your head the idea of selfish pleasure-seeking. The opiate high is what addicts need to function. Without that high you have a methadone-state. No physical withdrawal (provided the dose is right) but no energy, no enthusiasm either. A mood that's flat at best, severely depressed at worst. It's methadone's extreme unsuitability as a long-term treatment that leads addicts to the typical on-methadone pattern of behaviour where they give up raising heroin-money and reduce heroin sharply, yet in no way give it up. This is the best that methadone does. At its worst it merely exacerbates physical dependency. The addict drinks it, because they're forced to under legal duress, having been caught too many times shoplifting (or whatever). And they carry on precisely as before: piping, piping, piping crack (and methadone does nothing for crack addiction), drinking, popping downers and still using heroin ~ perhaps slightly less.

I've seen pensioners ~ on methadone for years ~ for whom Money Day is the highlight of the week. The Dealer comes round and hands out bags of magic B* that really does work, and does make them OK for the one or two days of the week they can afford it. The rest of the week they live a morose half-life. Heroin days are the only days anything gets done. A life on methadone is no life. I cannot see myself ever being OK on methadone, hence my reliance on temazepam and drink to be OK. On methadone alone I have all the symptoms of depression: excessive sleep, low mood, lack of interest in anything much, low self-esteem, fatigue, slowed thought process and a generalized misery unrelated to any particular issue or event.

The sooner I can get off this syrupy rubbish the better. My experience with antidepressants has been disastrous. My last reaction to mirtazapine was so extreme ~ involving not sleeping for days on end, pinging about everywhere for a week all disinhibited so people assumed I was drunk and on crack when it was just this antidepressant... then I crashed BADLY and got so low I felt my life was over. On one of my lowest days I scored heroin, not because I wanted it but only because I didn't know what else to do. I opened it and stared at it forlornly for hours, not wanting it, not wanting not to take it either. When I did eventually take it, heroin was no help.

This is why I feel I need psychiatric help. I'm not claiming to suffer any more than any other addict. All addicts suffer. I have a sense that something is going on with me that is undiagnosed and untreated. When I'm asked to name my problem on Government forms I don't know what to put any more. No psychiatrist is ever going to be my saviour, I know that. But I would appreciate the insight of someone who recognizes a constellation of experience and might say to me "this is the issue, this is what you can do about it".

So for me, it's no drugs. That's my prescribed therapy. No drugs, no drink. I'm not exactly flourishing on the no drink. Life hurts me too much not to be in a haze, so I don't know how I'm going to do it.

My current plan is to physically tidy myself and my house up. Then I'll pull the plug on alcohol and all these pills. And if life is so very unbearable that I just want to die, I'm going in the nuthouse. That's the only place left for me to go.

I'm fine today because I've had an extra special Xmas methadone dose, an extra special Xmas temazepam dose and a half-bottle of Caramel Baileys. So I'm in a pleasant fog of indifference. Without this pharmaceutical mist, I don't know how I will survive. But I'm determined to do it, no matter how much it hurts. I don't even care about losing my sanity. When I lost it three weeks ago it wasn't as frightening as you'd imagine. Your terror of insanity is the terror of a sane person. I was insane and hence not scared. When I first began to hear voices I found them hilariously funny. In fact I spent most of my time in the manic whirlwind laughing, singing and writing crap online. You can make the best of any situation. And that's what I've endeavoured to do my entire life through. Turn sour old lemons into refreshing lemonade. To make the best of a bad lot.

One day I hope to look back on this extended period of time-wasting and see no more than a bad memory from a past life. A life that's barely worth remembering, except as a cautionary tale for others. For if I can turn into a raving smackhead, literally anybody can. Heroin does not respect so-called boundaries of class or race, intelligence or social background. I'm by no means posh, but I did not come from a deprived housing estate. None of my friends or neighbours or family ever used heroin. I came to heroin through a mixture of fascination with a fair measure of death-wish thrown in. I came to it late (only got addicted at 28). But once it did get me, I knew I was well and truly got. Hook, line and sinker, it had me. No escape. And no way out. Heroin was the only thing that made life worthwhile. The only thing that made life made sense.

Every day without heroin or my substitution drink and pills on top of methadone is a day out in the cold, where life is fractured and senseless. And it hurts. I know I've said this before. I'm writing not to convince you of anything, but to convince myself that I can Do It. There is no Easy Way, I know that. If anybody has an Answer they think might help, I'd love to hear it. As things stand I'm plodding on as planned. And I will not be shaken or moved. I'll keep on trudging no matter how tired I get. I know life isn't meant to be fun. Life is a struggle. At least by struggling I'll know I'm Living.

My one Dream is that one day I might wake up somewhere sunny and safe and realize at last that I'm now a thousand miles away from where I used to be. That I finally have broken free. And that I'm never ever going back There. Where I never belonged, but nearly drowned.

I want Freedom.


*B is short for Brown. "Brown Sugar" base heroin from Afghanistan and other countries in the so-called Golden Crescent
**Re the UN's 2007 Opium Cultivation table, bear in mind that judging opium production per hectare without specialist knowledge can be deceptive. Specialists say Afghanistan's richer soil and superior irrigation infrastructure produce per-hectare opium yields more than double those of Burma ...


PS: I'm on Gabbly now (from about 5pm London time; that is about 9am Pacific, midday Eastern, 6pm Central European and about 3am most of Australia). Gabbly is my live chat box, towards the top of the sidebar, between the Double UO Globe symbol and the rotating molecule. Every new visitor here sets off a doorbell chime. Anyone who's up for a chat say Hi. If you don't get a response keep Dmmmm-Dmmm-Dmmming that thing and WAKE ME UP!




HM the Queen's Xmas Message 2010

The Queen's speech comes on BBC1 and ITV (the 2 major channels) at 3pm Xmas day.


This year she talks about the King James ("Authorized") translation of the Bible which is now four centuries old.


Plus the benefits of sport.


The Queen's Speech isn't exactly the most exciting broadcast of the year, but I, among millions of others, watch it, as much for the novelty of the Queen talking to me as anything else ...



It's 02:27 and I've just woken up having dreamed I was posting. See I'm in a chair with the computer in front of me, dreaming about posting and commenting on my blog. Got blogs on the brain, me!

Confession

I'M NOW ONLY ONE DAY CLEAN. Last night I wanted to score. I turned the idea over and over in my mind. I wiped my old text messages then a new one appeared, timed fifteen minutes earlier. This was from Dealer #1, the one who used to sell giant £20 bags. So I thought: You want it that much. You get it. So I did.

In a way there's nothing to post because the gear was so crap* that drugs-wise I might as well have chucked £15 down the drain and saved a perfectly good needle. It cooked up far too dark. It smelled of heroin being smoked, rather than cooked (a different smell). I thought that's odd. When I tasted a droplet: nothing. So I banged up the entire lot at once and felt the faintest opiate tinge for all of 45 seconds.

All I've done is ruin my number of Days Clear, not get high, throw £15 away.

On the plus side I got the craving to use out of my system. The same way I gave up crack two years ago, yet wondered back six or seven times afterwards, I never wanted it again the next day. I just remembered why I hated it that much. I no more want to use again than a person who went to Disney Land on Monday would wish they were on a rollercoaster again Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Heroin is a spectre from a past life. More a ghoul than a spectre. A monster who tries to deceive: You give me everything, then I'll give you More! Somehow, in the end, it didn't work.

So don't worry about me, I won't be hurrying back any time soon. I have Caramel Baileys, mince pies and temazepam, so I'm well sorted for Xmas.

Hope y'all have a Merry One one too. If it can't be Merry then may it be Tolerable. If you're 100% substance-free then may it be Serene (and of course Clean).


Plus I hope 2011 is better for you than this Bag-o-Shite year ever was!!

The doggie is an American Akita, the sort of dog I really want.

I'll be online on Gabbly tomorrow so if anyone wants to talk I'll be there.

*To anyone who hasn't followed, there has been a severe drought in the British heroin supply for over 2 months; that's why my formerly reliable dealer was selling crap. It's hard to find a constant, reliable source of heroin anywhere now.

Xmas Eve: 2 Top Tunes :-)

FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK: THE POGUES & KIRSTY MCCOLL
Embodying the True Spirit of Xmas, this easily takes the biscuit as as the best festive tune of all time.




Story of Fairytale of New York (10 mins)




MADONNA: SANTA BABY
Throw out any Madonna-preconceptions you might have, and you'll hear one of the best ever recordings of this song. You may well have heard this before, not even realizing who it was ...
This was recorded for a charity Xmas album so the song has never been released as a single. It is, however Madonna's most downloaded album track.
The video is a montage of True Blue, Material Girl and a live Oscars performance of Sondheim's Sooner or Later (from Dick Tracy) spliced together by a fan. Whoever did this has a professional's eye for video. It's brilliantly well done.

Dank

I CANNOT SLEEP PROPERLY. Last night I thought I'd take a sleeping pill (temazepam 20mg), to set my sleep cycle earlier. So much for good intentions: it only made me high. As good a high as heroin. (And very much an acquired taste. Nobody but a junkie could ever feel the blurry, rubbery feeling of benzodiazepines as a "high".)

Still I didn't sleep. I found myself online in a blur. Eventually I got pill number two. I felt rubbery and dizzy and hazy ("high") as I stumbled up to get it. So I decided to be all responsible and bit it in half. The extra 10mg only took over as the previous 20 peaked and faded. An hour or two later I took the other half. Still wide awake, but in bed. If I'd have slept I'd have slept with the computer in my arms, like an electronic baby. At some point I took a third pill, a whole 20mg. My thought process had gone haywire by this time as I left a garbled comment on my own blog (yesterday). At least in my jumbled-up state I had sanity enough to clarify this is what part of me thinks...

Last thing I remember was realizing it was 6am and being distinctly displeased about that. Then I slept through past 4:30. Got up at 5. Ran down the chemist with an hour to spare.

People kept calling me this morning on withheld numbers. I suspect 2 different callers as the pattern of rings before hangup was different. The dealer usually rings a long long time, leaves it then rings an hour later. This person rang and rang a few rings over and over. I wish people wouldn't withhold. When I find out who it was (if it was my friend) I have to explain NOT to do that. The dealer will ask me to jump through a hoop, expecting me to wag my tail and enthusiastically woof "how high, master?!" He wants me to test a piteously small amount of free gear, knowing this would (ordinarily) prompt a phone call within 30 mins asking for a £20 bag if not a gram. This one charges £40 on the gram (too much). A weighed gram always used to be £30. Or £35 tops as 2x0.5g £20s. (2x20=no more than 35 in addict maths!)

In the last few years I noticed the price sneaking higher. I had only one dealer who did giant bags, weighing 0.6 or 0.7g for £20. These were full of B (brown heroin) and packed with lovely benzos as well. It was a £10 hit on one of these that made me miss my friend's funeral. I woke 2 hours later realizing I'd missed it. Then I slept for 12 hours straight. This gear was beige but went midnight black in the works. I tested benzo-positive on a test-card I obtained, hadn't been at the Valium or any other pills. So I knew it was dodgy B setting this off.

Checking my text messages set off the craving that inspired all this junkie information you just read. I got 2 offering 4 bags for £25. Another one saying great new stuff. All this from "Mr 0.6". He's just round the corner. He's also the one who sold me the very last lot of gear I ever took, 3 weeks ago yesterday. £15 bought what looked like 0.4g of crushed paracetamol, cooked up without any vit C and contained a yellowy heroin solution full of mindblowingly potent downers. These downers wiped more than a week, maybe 2 weeks from my memory.

So I could have run round the corner and scored. Instead I glugged my methadone, which was due anyhow (strange how a due methadone dose and heroin-craving coincide, even though methadone's not on my mind). I also popped a temazepam. Well it is Xmas!

What is this? Yet another day without the Killer B? I can't believe it.

I don't exactly feel marvellous, but I am surviving. Just. In a blank, disengaged, not happy way. I'm still here. I only wonder how I will ever move from here somewhere better.

Now the drugs are climbing on I don't want gear so much. Drink, temazepam, methadone. I'm still an addict to my core. An addict who doesn't use Heroin is like a bird that can't fly. I think I'll turn into a furry animal instead. A tubby great hamster, curled in a ball down its burrow, sleeping, slumbering, drowsing all day long.

DonkeyTrotterNutterGoblinDongleSnatcher Sleeping...

WELL YESTERDAY WAS FUN. NOT.

I was depressed and stressed and my life is a mess. My house is a mess, but I'm cleaning that up. I'm a mess but that job is near undoable. Notice I say near. Because I will do it, no matter how hard or long the job.

I didn't sleep on Sunday night so I felt crap yesterday. Due to tireness I started hallucinating again, but not very much, and only mildly. That's the only good thing about sleep deprivation, mentally spinning sideways. I never thought there was unything unusual about this wandering my tired brain does, until it wandered right out of my skull, down the road, hopped on the tube, flew from Heathrow to America and Cape Kenaveral ~ then blasted up to the moon a couple of weeks ago! The fellow astronauts, by the way, apparently just thought it was a weird kind of experimental walnut blobbering about in zero gravity with them ...

My friend Valium Marilyn is depressed too. She hasn't been at all well. She's hibernating on pills in front of an enormous widescreen television.

I asked her whether she wanted to score Valium, but it was down to me to get it and there's been a lot of fake about, I didn't want that responsibility. I'm pretty sure the last lot I got was fake. Unless you can get tolerance on 10mg a day, 5 days a week, all throughout the second week, the pills were duff. So I got 6xtemazepam 20mg for far more than I considered reasonable, but I thought what the heck, it's better than heroin.

Then I didn't take ANY pills and slept from 4pm until 2am. Went to bed. Slept through till 9:30am. Didn't want to get up. Slept another 2 hours. Woke up at 11:30am. That's a good 19 hours' under. Fast asleep. Without any drugs or pills or excessive methadone. I didn't need methadone when I woke, but I took it, to avoid Heroin-craving.

When Heroin crosses my mind now I just think of the Misery I'm moving away from. No visualization is required. I associate Heroin with Homelessness, Poverty and Misery.

Heroin did hold me together better than anything else has done. So the Depression-type misery I feel now is just me without Heroin. In the end I felt it with or without Heroin anyway. Heroin took the edge off, there's no doubt about that. But it didn't even do that well in the end. That's how I knew it was time to stop.

I used an outside event, a drought. Originally I assumed that this would be a False Paradise. That if good gear ever does come back, I'd go right back to it. But that's not necessarily true at all.

For months going on years I had genuinely wanted OUT. I just couldn't get out. Now I am out, albeit thoroughly dependent on methadone, I'm staying out. I also obtained enough clarity to realize people DO stop heroin due to outside forces. Marianne Faithfull ODd herself, fell down a flight of stairs, broke her jaw and went from hospital to rehab. No painkillers. She was in such pain, but assumed this was just the pain of living without drugs. Then they realized a splint of bone was unset and had to put something resembling a guitar sproket to tighten the broken jawbone. That the pain of a broken bone can ever be taken as "normal" should tell you something, if you don't know, about how hard life actually is for an addict without opiates.

Example 2 is from another memoir: Kate Holden's In My Skin*. This is very slickly written and ultra-succinct (due perhaps to a good editor, I don't know how much she edited herself). Though it's a very good read, in a way the story is annoying in that she skates over certain issues, never lost anyone she loved thanks to drugs, never ODd, never had an abscess and so on. She never ponders her personal failings. She explains pretty well the descent into addiction but is unable to explain how she came out. Perhaps that is inexplicable. I can't explain why I don't want heroin, either. But her turning point was that she and her boyfriend were on methadone anyhow but using heavily on top. Around Xmas, she told her boyfriend, who depended on her utterly to pay for his drugs, that she was going to her family for a week. She continued working at a fairly upmarket brothel daily. One morning she awoke with him in the room. She told him to get lost and he did. But not before fishing all her money and a week's supply of Heroin out of her bag. And away! Personally I think this served her right, and she never offers a protestation to the contrary. But she did use it as her Turning Point. To take the methadone, carry on working. Stick to the juice, with one aberration, and keep working as the methadone went to zero then nothing. The money she saved paid for a long trip to Europe.

Last example: BMelonsLemonade came off heroin in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Four years later she's still clean. You can read BMelons' blog here: hashishdreamsandheroinnightmares.blogspot.com

So there we have it. It is possible to take an Opportunity and harness a willingness you never truly believed you had. No matter how much damage or devastation it has caused elsewhere, you can use a disaster to your own advantage.

If I'm not living proof enough, imagine BMelons clucking through that hurricane!

The only other thing that happened yesterday was the Broadband Goblin stole my internet stick, and scurried off down the high street singing "Skippadeedoodar-skippadee-day!" hopped on the Chinese Takeaway roof, said something extremely obscene in Cantonese and then vanished. Not that Gledwood would be stupid enough to put a computer dongle in a pocket with a hole in, or anything... So I had to get a new one for nearly £40 from Argos. Considering £40 used to buy a gram and a bit of heroin, and that this was usually gone well within a day unless I carefully hid some from myself, I'm not too upset about shelling out £40 ($60US).

And I still have 6 sleeping pills, untouched.


Anna Grace is having a **** time over "near" Chicago (Wisconsin). Depressed too. Very depressed. I hope it's soon GONE Anna.





*You should be able to read a bit of In My Skin by clicking here.
Without launching into a big critique of the book, it provoked a mixed reaction in me, but it is still one of the best drug-memoirs I've read.
The UK edition looks like this.

You can read BMelons' memoir extract 1 here (heroin sickness).
And extract 2 here.


Am I the only one watching that dreadful Holy Land Xmas story tripe on BBC and loathing it?
Are they actually trying to make it a parody of the Life of Brian?
Everyone has issues. Everybody’s miserable. I have a suspicion every character came with a social-worker file type “backstory” detailing how their mother didn’t love them. Lots of unholy conflict. Even the three wise men are borderline arguing… Akh Xmas! Doncha love it. I’m off for more Morrisons Best Mince Pies. Yumyumyumyumyummmmm!

Did/does nobody like Rebecca Ferguson, by far the most superior contestant ever to appear on the X-Factor? If Beautiful wasn't good enough, here's Candle in the Wind, Show 7